The Iliad: Setting 1 key example

Another predominant setting in the poem is Mount Olympus. The poem is structured by two parallel plots; while describing the events taking place in and around Troy, Homer consistently depicts the gods’ observation of and involvement in the war. With this constant movement between Troy and Mount Olympus, Homer shows that—for the gods—the border between the mortal and immortal world is quite permeable.

While Troy, the Achaeans’ ships, the battlefield, and Mount Olympus are the main settings, Homer also takes the narrative to other parts of the Greek world through the fighters’ flashbacks. In the war, it isn't only the Achaean forces that are far from home. Many of Trojan forces have also travelled far in order to fight. This brings some challenges to Trojans side. Because they’re "gathered here from all ends of the realm" and "speak a thousand different tongues," communication and strategizing are occasionally problematic on the Trojan side.

Throughout the poem, the characters themselves are very attached to place. This is partly because a character’s provenance tends to determine which side he’s fighting on. Regardless of the war, however, the poem makes it clear that geographical origin was an important part of people’s identity in the Ancient Greek world. Very often, the characters’ names are accompanied by their birthplace and the name of their father. And when Homer introduces or focuses on characters of a certain importance, he tends to share rich details about their backgrounds, which largely revolve around where they’re from and what lineage they’re a part of. The poem features numerous examples of the characters understanding each other and themselves through information about where they come from and who their family members are. 

The poem's temporal setting is the 10th year of the Trojan War. The poem opens in media res, and we're told that the war has already been going on for 10 years. While there's no scholarly consensus on whether the Trojan War was a real historical event, it's typically dated back to the 12th or 13th century BCE—around the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. Homer thus wrote the poem several centuries after the Trojan War supposedly took place, on the other side of the Greek Dark Ages. For the people of Homer’s time, the Trojan War formed a crucial part of their understanding of the past. They recognized the Iliad as a mythologized telling of the war, but they still viewed it as a kind of historical source. While the historicity of the oral poetic tradition is debated today, the Greeks of the Classical period took Homer's epics as part of the history of the city states—of their history.